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Today's Opinions

Now that we’ve made it through the primary process and have a race for Colorado’s U.S. Senate seat between Democratic incumbent Michael Bennet and Republican challenger Ken Buck, it looks to me like the key to victory in this year’s race will be unaffiliated and Republican women voters from the suburbs.

So it’s come to this. In perhaps the most favorable Republican year since at least 1994, scandal-plagued GOP front-runner Scott McInnis can’t even close the deal on his own party’s nomination, much less the general election.

Abby Posner has leapt from the gold pans of Colorado to the “Frying Pans and Freeways” of L.A. Many know this former local artist from her solo career as a singer/songwriter. The high caliber of her musical talent began when she studied guitar under Kevin Alumbaugh at the Evergreen School of Music. I have friends who still remember her inspired performances with the Kamikaze Kids, an ‘80s theater group conducted by Clear Creek’s Jimy Murphy.

In the week following the Sept. 11 attacks, Colorado Congresswoman Diana DeGette attended religious services at both a Jewish synagogue and an Islamic mosque. Her visit to Temple Emanuel coincided with our Rosh Hashanah services, which are very well attended, and Rabbi Steve Foster, the spiritual leader of the congregation, welcomed her publicly and made a point of telling everyone in attendance that she was attending the mosque that week as well.

Negative attacks, they say, have long been part of politics. In “Going Dirty: the Art of Negative Campaigning” by David Mark, we’re told that in the 1828 presidential election, Andrew Jackson’s political allies nicknamed John Quincy Adams “the Pimp,” a reference to “a rumor that while he was ambassador to Russia a decade earlier, he had coerced a young woman into having an affair with a czar.”

From county commissioner to Colorado governor, Jeffco voters face very crowded ballots this year, and as the primary election approaches on Aug. 10, our opinion pages will no doubt become more crowded as well.

Before the usual avalanche of political letters to the editor — and the subsequent phone calls asking why some letters haven’t appeared — I’d like to review our policy.

• All letters must be accompanied by a verifiable name, along with information that allows us to contact the author.

Did you ever have a really great teacher? Someone who changed your life?

I’ve been lucky to have more than one. In elementary school, I wasn’t the easiest kid — you could say I was pretty tough. These days I’d surely be diagnosed with ADD (actually, to say I had an attention deficit is a huge understatement). But Mrs. Arnold and Mrs. Ballangee stuck with me. It would have been easy to ignore this rowdy kid, but they put in extra hours, helping me learn what I couldn’t have learned on my own. I’m grateful they did.